Here is a link to the Object Management Group CORBA website. This is more than you need to know for this course, but the place to start if you want to dig deeper into CORBA.
Here is a high level overview of CORBA
J. Christopher Hawley's presentation on Web Services
PowerPoint
pdf format
Here are all of his handouts.
The W3School has terrific on-line tutorials for a lot of this material.
Here are links to a number of these
SOAP
WSDL
RDF